A victory in the long war against terrorism

Machiavelli is the author of the saying “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Islamabad was certainly practising what the author of The Prince advocated: The hideout where Osama bin Laden was killed was a stone’s throw from Pakistan Military Academy, the headquarters of a Pakistani army division and the regimental centres of the Frontier Force and the Baloch Regiments. In the parlance of covert operations, such places are called “safe houses” and what could be safer than a house in the middle of a cantonment?
The relationship between Islamabad and Washington has been somewhat strange. The Pakistanis have ostensibly delivered all the Al Qaeda figures they could lay their hands on  for what is now a total of $20 billion in aid. At the same time, the Pakistani establishment has provided support and sanctuary to the Taliban, the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group and the Haqqani network which is fighting the US in Afghanistan. The Americans have been fully aware of this double game, but been able to do little about it. Will Osama’s killing change things?
 
Questions
Speaking to the nation, and indeed the world, US President Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that the operation was an entirely American affair and any information about it was conveyed to the Pakistani authorities only after the deed was done. A report of a meeting in Islamabad convened by President Asif Zardari and attended,  among others, by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the heads of various intelligence agencies notes, “The meeting was told that the Pakistan forces did not take part in the operation and the operation was done under the US policy and Pakistan was informed after the completion of operation.”




For a man who had vanished into the thin air after that battle in Tora Bora in the winter of 2001, there are a lot of answers that the world will be looking for. Some will be forthcoming through his autopsy which the Americans will have no doubt conducted. For example, was he in need of regular dialysis? Second, there will be questions about his whereabouts in these years and his relations, if any,  with Pakistani authorities. The answer to this, too, will be forthcoming since the US has custody of his wives and children who will no doubt be debriefed. In addition there is an unspecified number of persons captured at the site who will provide some answers.
There are some questions that Pakistan, too, needs to answer in a credible fashion. Principally, who owned the building where Osama was staying? We should not forget that all the top Al Qaeda leaders who have been arrested till now were found in Pakistani safehouses—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshib in Karachi, Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad. We are being told that the national identity card of the house-owner was bogus and that no such person exists. How convenient!
Just as the rise of bin Laden had consequences for the world, so could his sudden death. His killing took place at a time when the Arab world has been hit by a string of what are clearly secular revolts—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. It is quite clear, as of now, that the Islamists have taken a back seat and that the popular anger against authoritarian rule has been led by the rising middle-class, rather than a bunch of fanatics who want to take the region, if not the world into the medieval ages. So, bin Laden’s end could be the signal that the high tide of jihadism which was unleashed by the American-Saudi jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, is now ebbing.
In Pakistan, there are two possible outcomes. One, that his death will mark the beginning of the end of the Al Qaeda led anti-American war in Afghanistan and the elimination of the groups which were propped up by the outfit—the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Haqqani network and the loose coalition of Punjabi militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Harkat-ul-mujahideen and so on and
so forth.
 
Consequences
On the other hand, the event could actually intensify the anti-American movement in Pakistan and serve to re-energise the jihadists and their constituency. This is, after all, a country where the murderer of Salman Taseer was feted by the middle-class lawyers of Lahore. Radicals of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba know that the US will use the occasion to push the Pakistan army into an offensive in North Waziristan. And if the US has additional information on the possible complicity of some Pakistani officials in shielding bin Laden, they would gain a major leverage against the generals in Rawalpindi who are procrastinating. 
The consequences of Osama’s death will be indirect in India, though they could be important. Despite periodic alarums, the Al Qaeda did not operate in India and had no “India” chapter. The link comes through Pakistani militant groups that had allied themselves to the Al Qaeda and who shared their Wahabbist religious outlook such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.  But even the Lashkar which focuses its operations on India, has by-and-large avoided recruiting Indian Muslims. Their operations, such as the Mumbai attack were handled exclusively by Pakistani and Pakistani-origin Muslims, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by the Mumbai police.
But, if the US learns that there was much greater complicity of Pakistani officials in giving sanctuary to Osama, things could be different. For the past several years, the US has made its distrust of Pakistan quite clear; even while it has provided Islamabad with billions of dollars of aid, it has stopped sharing vital information, such as planned drone strikes with their Pakistani counterparts. The recent relationship between the two countries has been rocky. Last week, the Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Dawn newspaper “It is fairly well known that the ISI has a long standing relationship with the Haqqani network [which] is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners… but that’s the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship [between the US and Pakistan].” 
 
Win
But winning one battle does not constitute victory in a war. The death of bin Laden can be a beginning of a process, but one which we cannot take for granted. The Al Qaeda idea has spread far and wide and while it is unlikely that another leader of Osama bin Laden’s calibre will emerge, there will be many smaller bin Ladens around.
The United States needs to carefully use the occasion of bin Laden’s death to shift the momentum against the jihadists in a definitive manner.
They have shown great courage and determination in planning and executing the covert operation that netted Osama, but now they need equal political common sense and hard diplomacy to consolidate their gains.
Mail Today May 3, 2011

A marriage made in hell has lessons for us all

What would you say of a relationship where the enemy of one partner is the ally of the other? Not much, I am sure. Well that’s the short description of the US-Pakistani marriage. Even as the Al Qaeda-Taliban alliance kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan provides the former sanctuary, aid and even direction. And Islamabad remains, for the record, a major partner in what the Americans used to once call the Global War on Terror.
This twisted relationship is the burden of the latest tranche of Wikileaks documents published by The New York Times and The Guardian which relate to the 2004-2007 period. The more recent contretemps —where Islamabad has demanded a curtailment of drone strikes and CIA activities in Pakistan— have been about Pakistan’s insistence that the only condition under which it will continue its relationship with the US is within the bounds of this somewhat lethal ménage à trois.



Alliance
Subsequent American decision-makers were not so shrewd. Under the influence of Cold War hawk John Foster Dulles, the US armed Pakistan to the point where superiority in armour, artillery and air force propelled Islamabad to make war with India in August-September 1965. And this was just the beginning.
In the second instance, in the 1980s, the US indulgence was more serious. Non-proliferation, a central tenet of US policy at the time, was simply ignored as Washington looked away when Pakistan stole and otherwise obtained nuclear weapons and missiles from a variety of sources.
In the third instance, the US, but for a brief period in 1992-3, ignored Pakistani state involvement with terrorist activity against India. It was only when the US was attacked in 2001 did Washington change its position. Even then, it displayed enormous forbearance, as has been brought out by the Guantanamo tranche of the Wikileaks documents, which indicate that the US has a great deal of evidence of official Pakistani complicity in terrorism.
And these documents only pertain to what passed through the Pentagon’s SiprNet system which was allegedly accessed by Bradley Manning who gave the documents to Julian Assange. The information available with the CIA and other US intelligence agencies could conceivably be much greater.
Yet, in the 2000-2007 period, the US again took an indulgent view of Pakistan, heaping aid and honours (grant of major non-NATO ally status in 2004) on Islamabad. But today the situation has changed.
But now Pakistan is no longer a factor that will make a difference between defeat and victory in Afghanistan—it is the factor that is contributing to what looks like an imminent American defeat, or retreat from Afghanistan.
 
Interests
Nothing concentrates the mind, like the guillotine or the prospect of defeat. American leaders are now talking a different language. Many observers think that the issue has come to head because of the drone campaign. That’s not true. The US has, with Pakistani permission and from Pakistani bases, been using drones to attack the Al Qaeda-Taliban militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan for several years. It is true, of course, that the drone issue is inextricably tangled with the mess that is the US-Pakistan relationship.
The principal US drone strikes have been in North Waziristan  which the Pakistan army has avoided entering because it is the place where its principal ally in its duplicitous Afghan game is located—the Haqqanis, father and son and proxies that can be used against India and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The US has avoided strikes in the Quetta region or elsewhere because of Pakistani sensitivities.   The Pakistanis are now using the threat to evict the US from the bases from which drone strikes are launched, to express their anger against the US’ counter-terrorism activities from Pakistani soil against targets that Islamabad cherishes, such as the Haqqanis, tribal allies like Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Mullah Nazir as well as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. Given this situation, the US has had little alternative but to bypass the ISI.
 What seems to have immediately got Islamabad’s goat is the American effort to check the activities of the LeT which in its reckoning has become a major danger to the US. The LeT was reportedly the target of the activities of Raymond Davis and several American CIA operatives.
What has worried the US are the cross connections between the Al Qaeda, Taliban and Pakistani militants like Ilyas Kashmiri as well as what could be rogue ISI personnel, or those who are acting on behalf of the outfit on the basis of plausible deniability.
For its part, Islamabad is simply not willing to let go of the Haqqanis and the LeT, entities in which it has invested so heavily.
 
Illusions
The Pakistani attitude to the conflict in Afghanistan is somewhat curious. On one hand, it is a fact that the Pakistan Army has been fighting a tough campaign in the tribal areas of the country to defeat the Tehreek-e-Taliban. But, by staying out of North Waziristan, it is betraying the very sacrifices that Pakistani soldiers are making elsewhere. Because, it is well known that almost every kind of militant that opposes the Pakistani state is holed up in that area as well.
The Pakistanis do not want to act in that region because militant groups they consider vital for their policy of gaining control of Afghanistan in the post-US withdrawal scenario are located there.  In short, the national interests of the two allies in the war against terrorism are clashing head-on and there seems to be little room available for compromise.
The illusion Islamabad suffers from is that time stands still and a return of the Taliban would mean a country once again dominated by Pakistan. The last ten years of conflict have changed the Taliban’s composition and outlook. Taliban attitudes towards Pakistan vary from pragmatic opportunism to outright contempt. The Taliban need Pakistani sanctuary, but to expect them to be grateful for it after they win— presuming of course that they do— would be naivete of the highest order.
Recent statements suggest that the US has become more realistic in its assessment of what Islamabad can’t do, and what it can but won’t. But that does not alter the fact that the world’s foremost military power, the United States, is confronted with a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ scenario. If it were not for the fact that the outcome of this relationship has a bearing on India’s well being, one could have been pardoned for a sense of schadenfreude.
Mail Today April 28, 2011

There is more to change than mere laws

Indians  seem to have a love affair with laws. They imbue them with talismanic properties, and so they have laws for the right to information, the right to education, to prohibt dowry, pre-natal determination of a child’s sex, child labour, and a basic law on the right to work. A law to guarantee food for all is currently being debated within government. And now there is a demand for a law  to fight corruption.
No doubt the fertile National Advisory Council has some more exciting laws in mind for the future. All this is despite the   experience which shows that laws, especially those that seek to alter social behaviour,  don’t always work —  think of the continuing problem of dowry, female foeticide, caste discrimination and child labour. 


Looked at one way, there could be an argument that this faith in the letter of a law is born out of a desire to force the pace of modernisation. In today’s India, sadly, it also reflects a bureaucratisation of politics, where social reform and entitlements are dished out by a benevolent government and bureaucracy, rather than through a process of politics that shapes society and is in turn shaped by it.
In that sense, it represents an atrophying of our mainstream political parties who are content to rule through grandstanding, usually to TV cameras, rather than undertake the hard work of educating and mobilising public opinion towards desired end. In such a climate of lassitude, evil triumphs, be it in the case of sex determination which is preventing millions of girls from taking birth, or the brutal rule of the misogynist and anti-social khap panchayats of Haryana and Western UP. 

Middle-class 
In greater measure it represents a lack of understanding of the fact that the elimination of social evils, and affirmation of human rights, are products of social, political and historical processes, not merely laws. A law is just the codification  by a legislative body to a social or political demand. These thoughts come to mind as we look at the Anna Hazare phenomenon.
 Corruption has been a slow burning fuse in India. But in 2010, it flared up with the revelation of a spate of scams and scandals across the country. It began, arguably, with the IPL episode that led to the downfall of Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor, and was followed up in quick succession by  the long-playing CWG fiasco, accompanied by the CAG’s confirmation of the scale of the 2G spectrum scam, the UP humongous food scam and culminating in the arrest of Hasan Ali, who had allegedly stashed tens of billions of dollars abroad for corrupt politicians and officials. 
To the horror of the middle class even the revered Indian Army got embroiled in the process through the Sukhna and Adarsh society scams.
 Many have commented on the middle class nature of  Hazare’s support. Perhaps this is a fact, if so, it is probably what persuaded the government to compromise. Revolutions are  a middle class phenomenon as the English, French and even Russian revolutions reveal. The middle class  was central to the upsurge against Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s. And it was the class which gave us the independence movement and our first wave of reform in the late 19th and early 20th century.  
Sadly  the  Indian middle class of today cannot be compared to their counterparts in Europe who provided a leavening to the European advance — Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Lord Keynes, Hegel, Darwin —  to take a few random names.
 Our middle class of today produces great managers, scientists and economists, but its philosophers, social reformers and academics occupy the margins of an intellectual wasteland.  For the bulk of the Indian middle class, intellectual inspiration, if you can call it that,  comes from new age gurus like Ramdev, Jaggi Vasudev, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Sai Baba and others.
 Like all middle classes, the Indian one is  vocal, and its sense of outrage — often self-centered and hypocritical — is magnified by the 24x7 news channels and newspapers, particularly the influential publications in the English language. So our politicians — themselves Grade A rascals —  feel compelled to heed them.
Mature democracies have all gone through the stages we have, but in time that spans hundreds of years. Child labour played an important role in the industrialisation of England in the early 19th century and in the United States in the last part of that century.  Criminalised politics, mass prostitution and ill-treatment of women, the poor and the under-classes were all features of democracies whose societies are the envy of the world today.

Progressive
 In some ways India is  at the point where the United States began its Progressive movement, whose emphasis was on rationalism, pragmatism and democracy, an effort whose bottom line was to create a political apparatus which could meet the needs of a country that had undergone profound economic and social change.
 Late 19th century US had all the social evils we see around us today — the oppression (reinforced by violence) of blacks, criminalised and corrupt politics, predatory businessmen who thought nothing of manipulating governments and stock markets, child labour, gender oppression, extreme exploitation of labour, especially that of migrants.
The Progressive movement was not one coherent affair. It spanned several decades and involved many  political currents and counter-currents. It was illuminated by the writing of “muckrackers” like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and writers like Upton Sinclair and buttressed by the work of intellectuals like Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. And it involved thousands of middle-class activists, writers, lawyers, journalists, clergymen and social workers.

Process
 By World War I, it had helped break up business monopolies, regulated railroad competition, created vast national parks, modernised municipal governance, promoted direct elections to the US Senate and strengthened the power of the federal government. It was in this era that the steel baron Andrew Carnegie began a trend when he sold his business and gave away his entire fortune for education, research and peace. It was also the era that gave birth to  voluntarism in the US.
An anti-corruption movement requires far greater depth than the one that went into the Anna Hazare fast. Reform movements around the world have come about in clusters in the 1830s, 1860s and 1920s  in  UK,  in the 1830s, 1900s and 1930s in the US.  Reform occurs in a  certain climate and covers multiple subjects — education, health, temperance, the rights of labour and so on. The activists often straddle several interests. Jyotiba Phule was involved in movements to uplift Dalits, gender equality and reforming religion.Gandhi’s various interests, too, are well known.
The reformist impulse in the first half of the 20th century yielded laws, passed immediately after independence, leading to universal franchise, abolition of landlordism, reservations for Dalits and the codification of the Hindu personal laws. They were underpinned by the huge effort of  intellectuals and  activists too numerous to name here. And, most important, they drove the politics of the nation, not professional politicians.  
Mao once said that a revolution is not a dinner party. It need not be the charnel house he created in China, but neither can it be a flash mob that gathers for a weekend of agitation and then disperses. Political, social and intellectual change must march in a mutually reinforcing lock-step. A law is — or ought to be — merely a final legal stamp of a forward advance which is already with us.
Mail Today April 22, 2011

BREAK THE TOXIC CHINA-PAKISTAN CONNECTION

 

THE talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Hu Jintao at the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Sanya, in China, has led to yet another step— albeit incremental— to restore some kind of normality to Sino- Indian ties which have been buffeted by controversy in the last three years.

The problem, to be fair, was not the fault of one or the other side. Beijing’s calculated go- slow on the dialogue between the Special Representatives was to signal its unhappiness with the growing proximity of India to the US. This was sought to be countered by India through a media driven campaign to paint China as an aggressor on the Sino- Indian border. Events in Tibet on the eve of the 2008 Olympics compounded the problem.

The Chinese then escalated matters by stapling visas to Indian passport holders who were residents of Kashmir, signaling a shift in its Kashmir stance. When this, in August 2010, included the then chief of the Army’s Northern Command, Lt Gen B. S. Jaswal, India terminated military- to- military exchanges.

 

Sino- Pak

The Wen Jiabao visit in December and the meeting with Hu have clearly reversed the slide. As is its wont, China won’t announce that it has ended the stapled visa regime, but they will revert to the regular visas henceforth. India will send a military delegation to visit China, and will include a representative of the Northern Command. Just when the special representative level talks will press on from the high- point of 2005 is difficult to predict, as is the immediate future of Sino- Indian rapprochement.

The reason is that some of the underlying causes for the estrangement remain.

One instance of this is the media- driven effort to derail Sino- Indian relations. Early this month, a TV channel known for its steroid- driven approach to news, came up with what appeared, at first sight, to be a sensational report claiming that Chinese troops were deployed alongside the Pakistanis along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

The news package, complete with stock footage of massed tanks, missiles and marching soldiers, was clearly designed to scare. The hidden subtext of the programme was the growing danger to India of a two- front war.

A closer scrutiny revealed that the report was based on a speech made by Lt Gen K. T. Parnaik, the new Northern Army commander, at a media seminar that had taken place in Jammu some nine days previously.

At least two on- the- spot media reports merely have the general talking of Sino-Pak cooperation emerging as a possible future threat to the country. Referring to Chinese road and bridge building activity in Gilgit and Baltistan, the general said that the developments could “ jeopardise our geostrategical interests in the long run and pose great military challenges not only along the Sino- Indian border but also along the Line of Control for us.” All quite kosher stuff, the kind of things generals are paid to think about, and, note, that the danger was talked of in the future tense.

So alarming has been the effort by some media groups to promote bad blood between India and China that last December, at the end of his three- day visit to India Wen Jiabao complained that despite the fact that not a shot had been fired on the Sino- Indian border for a long time, “ the boundary question has been repeatedly sensationalised by the [ Indian] media…” 

China’s close military relationship with Pakistan is no secret. Neither is the fact that there are hundreds of Chinese personnel in the region participating in some 30 odd projects in the Azad Kashmir- Northern Areas region of Kashmir. But any talk of the Sino- Pak nexus must also take into account the fact that the Karakoram highway linking the two countries is virtually dysfunctional, with some 24 km of it under a lake formed by last year’s floods and landslides. Indeed, many Chinese personnel are involved in rebuilding this road.

Options 

We can, of course, make a fundamental objection to the presence of all Chinese personnel in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir based on our claim over the entire state.

But India has not formally taken that view.

Instead, the criticism has come via what appear to be clearly inspired efforts to heighten Sino- Indian tensions through the media. This is a dangerous game and has, alarmingly, been played once earlier in 1959- 1962 when a belligerent Indian media pushed an unprepared Indian Army into a disastrous war with China.

Those who see some sinister design in the Chinese presence in Pakistan, or parts of territory claimed by India are missing the wood for the trees. Improving Pakistan’s infrastructure or helping maintain it, is the least pernicious nature of the Pakistan- China link.

By providing nuclear weapons and missiles to Pakistan, China has already done far greater harm to Indian security than it can now do in any other way. As the record shows, the Chinese did not merely facilitate Pakistan’s nuclear programme, they actually gifted a weapon design to them, and tested that weapon at their own range in 1990. Since then it has provided Islamabad ballistic missiles, and more recently, cruise missiles to carry these weapons.

India can shout this from the rooftops and denounce China with all its might and main.

But that is unlikely to get us anywhere. We can, of course, contemplate war to redress our wrongs, but no matter what our chicken hawks may say, that would be an act of lunacy. India could alternatively ally itself to a big power like the US to settle scores with China. The US may pull Pakistan’s chestnuts out of the fire, but it is unlikely to oblige India. We could well end up pulling America’s chestnuts out of the fire.

Strategy

If you look at the current situation, it would appear that Indian policy feels compelled to move on two ruts called Pakistan and China. Those who advocate unrelenting hostility to Pakistan and China are actually trying to take us deeper into those ruts.

Any Indian grand strategy must have as its principal aim the need to weaken the links between our two inimical neighbours.

How you do it is not the issue. Because if you can’t you will lose the game. This strategy has to yield a policy that makes better ties— rather than hostility with New Delhi— the preferred option in Beijing and Islamabad.

India has managed to establish a mutually beneficial economic relationship with China. It now needs to shape the ties in such a way that Beijing is made conscious of the cost of alienating New Delhi.

Pakistan is a more complex problem. For the present, the Pakistani deep state comprising the Army and hard- line religious fundamentalists have the upper hand.

Broadly, Manmohan Singh’s policy of persisting with what seems to be a Sisyphean effort to normalise ties with Pakistan is a better option than adopting a hostile posture towards it. Carefully planned and executed engagement, at least points to a way out instead of remaining mired at a dead end.

The irony is that those who are warning about the dangers of a two- front war are doing everything to make that a reality.

Instead, they ought to be educating us about a viable strategy of delinking the China- Pakistan connection— our key strategic headache— one that will define our geostrategic footprint in our region and Asia.

India may be right to demonise China and denounce the sinister nature of the Sino- Pakistan relationship, but unrelentingly hostile rhetoric cannot substitute for a viable strategy that will ensure a peaceful neighbourhood, in which India can race against time to use its demographic dividend to eliminate poverty, and become a developed country.

Mail Today April 15, 2011

Nuclear power plans must face Fukushima fallout

On the evening of March 26       lights in Rashtrapati Bhavan and some houses in South Delhi were dimmed between 8.30 and 9.30 pm.  They were observing Earth Hour, an event organised by the World Wildlife Fund which sees millions of households and noted landmarks like the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Sydney Opera House and India Gate in New Delhi turning off their lights for an hour. Living as many do, in a privileged enclave of the national capital, they were perhaps unaware of the irony of their action.
Large parts of India, indeed many of its urban centres as well, observe endless “earth hours” every day. Their gesture would probably have been better appreciated if they had taken a pledge to turn off their lights for an hour or two every day, so that they could share the misery of the hundreds of millions in this country who do not know what 24x7 electricity supply means.




Our worries could well increase a great deal more now in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Nuclear power constitutes just about 3 per cent of all the electricity produced in the country today. But it has an important place in the plans for the coming decades. India’s hopes of meeting the huge demand of electricity from 2030 and beyond, with the least possible carbon emissions, rest on its civil nuclear programme.
 
Projections
That India is short of electricity today is hardly a secret, though many living in privileged city areas are often unaware of the extent to which their fellow citizens are deprived. In 2005, India’s electricity consumption per capita was a mere 480.5 kWh as compared to 1780 of China and 2013 of Brazil and 13,635 of the US.
India’s future growth depends on its ability to overcome this problem. Admittedly, we are not doing too well. The latest central electricity authority figures show that in the year 2010-11, we set a target of around 21,441MW, but achieved a little less than half that figure. Not surprisingly, of the three sectors—hydro, thermal and nuclear— the last named was the most disappointing, achieving only 18 per cent of the target set.
The government has undertaken several  reforms to promote higher electricity generation and better distribution. Plans are afoot to give a boost to the moribund coal mining sector and even grander policy measures are in place to enable nuclear energy to be produced. But the recent Fukushima accident has put a crimp on some of the more ambitious aspects of these plans.
A 2006 Planning Commission Report of the Expert Committee on Integrated Energy Policy chaired by Kirit Parikh said that to maintain an 8 per cent rate of growth— as well as a regime of the least possible carbon emissions and a maximisation of all the renewable sources of energy— we would still require a mix where coal and oil are the mainstays in 2031-32. But the other sources like nuclear and hydro would be vital to prevent shortfalls and the requirements of meeting our commitments to the low carbon emission regime.
It is possible to forgo the nuclear component in this mix, but the balance would have to be made up with more oil, natural gas or coal. The Parikh committee’s “coal-dependent” scenario projects the requirement increasing from 406 million tonnes in 2004-5 to 2,555 million tonnes in 2031-2. India has abundant coal, but it is of poor quality and as it is, more than 50 per cent of the traffic on the Indian Railways today is in ferrying coal. Of this one third is nothing but dirt, since Indian coal is not of good quality and most of it is not washed in the collieries. Carrying five times more coal would probably mean handing over our entire railway system for the exclusive carriage of coal.
Actually what it would more likely mean is that we sharply increase our import of coal, thus making us dependent on imports for yet another element of our energy matrix. Then, of course, is the issue of enhancing port capacity as well as transportation links. And, this is for an 8 per cent growth scenario. If we want double digit growth, you would have to rework the math.
It would be difficult, therefore, for India to say goodbye to nuclear power. Beggars, they say, cannot quite be choosers. Even so, given our relatively small nuclear power programme and great ambitions, this is the best time to confront the issues that have been raised by the Fukushima disaster.
 
Transparency
Sadly, the debate on the dangers of nuclear energy has been limited. One protagonist, a former member of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, has taken the occasion to ride his hobby horse—the criticism of the proposal to import light water reactors. Instead of using his supposed expertise—the safety of Indian nuclear plants—to tell us whether or not the Indian nuclear power reactor operation is safe— and will be so even when the fast breeder reactor comes into stream—he has been inveighing against foreign nuclear technology and giving a clean chit to the existing reactors being run by the Department of Atomic Energy.
He is missing the wood for the trees. Each reactor type imported will have to meet the type certification which will be done by the AERB. So, he should tell us whether or not  the AERB is up to the job, and if not, how the government could strengthen the regulatory system so that it can be so.
The Prime Minister has ordered a review of the systems, but the Department of Atomic Energy has, unfortunately, a poor record on the subject. It has used its “holy cow” status to deny information on nuclear “events” that ought to have been available for the asking. Post-Fukushima, there is need for the government to come up with a far more credible regulatory regime than the one that exists.
 
Alternatives
There is need here for systems and structures which are transparent and rigorous.  There should be nothing secret about the working of a power reactor. Everything about its operation, the status of spent fuel, the levels of radiation in key areas around the plant etc. should be in the public domain, preferably on a real time basis.
In addition to the review of the regulatory mechanism, there is need to revisit the “holy” three-stage nuclear programme of the DAE as well. The country has been told how much the DAE has achieved and how great its fast-breeder technology is, but no one has told us about its potential hazards, which are possibly greater than those of the existing power reactors, to go by the experience of Japan and France. Danger by itself need not deter us, provided we have a clear idea as to what they are, and what the nuclear establishment plans to do about them.
This is a good time, too, to look at the alternatives to fast breeder reactors. As the Parikh report has suggested, the import of light water reactors was seen as a hedge against the failure or delays in the fast breeder and thorium reactor programmes. There is, for example, the pebble bed reactor, a programme which the Germans and South Africans developed, and which the Chinese have adopted in a big way, which can utilise our abundant thorium resources without the dangers associated with fast-breeder reactors.
Fukushima has made it clear that we do need to have far better reassurance on the safety of Indian power plants—firstly of those functioning right now, as well as those that will come in the future.  This is not something we should take at one or the other person’s words. What is needed is a strong institutional response, not the high decibel opinion of one individual. 
Mail Today April 7, 2011

India's dodgy stand on the Libyan crisis

The Indian response to the  events in Libya has been craven and cynical. Just how craven is evident from the manner in which External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna rushed to condemn the coalition air strikes on Libya, even though by choosing to abstain on a crucial UN Security Council vote, New Delhi ensured that the action would take place. And just how cynical our polity’s response has been is manifested by the discussion in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday where all parties condemned the bombing. The fact that Mulayam Singh Yadav kicked off the discussion points to its true nature— the search for the Muslim vote.
After standing on the sidelines at the UN Security Council discussions and then shedding crocodile tears over the developments in Libya, India is displaying its tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, a trait so painfully apparent in the triangular dealings between India, US and Iran, as revealed by Wikileaks.
 
Resolution
But why blame India? The Arab League called for the action and two of the key African nations—South Africa and Nigeria—along with Gabon, voted for the resolution along with the principal western countries, minus Germany. Had India and, say, Brazil, actually opposed the resolution, it would have failed, as it would have if either Russia or China had voted against it.
The language of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSC 1973) mandating “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians and the establishment of a no fly zone (NFZ) over the country, is as clear as it could be. The resolution was not passed in a hurry, but after extensive consultations and discussions.
All the diplomats there would have  known what a “no fly zone” meant. The one over southern Iraq in 1991-2003  involved attacks on any active air defence sites. Had Colonel Gadhafi immediately acknowledged UNSC 1973 on March 17 and indicated his compliance by grounding his air force and switching off his air defence radars, it would have been difficult to justify the attack that was launched three days later on March 20th. But the Colonel denounced the resolution and this meant that to implement the NFZ, it would be necessary to take out his air defence network.




Libya operates—to be precise operated—an extensive air defence network based on Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and fighter aircraft to protect its cities and oil installations along the Mediterranean coast. The coalition cruise missile attacks were clearly aimed at eliminating these. Of these, the SA-5 with a range of 250 kms and the Mig-25 fighters were particularly dangerous.
Two contrary pulls have marked the debate on Libya. One relates to the sanctity of the state, as underwritten by the Westphalian state system. The other is the right, sanctified in practice, if not international law, to revolt against tyranny. What is happening in Libya is not some western conspiracy. It arose out of the way in which Colonel Gadhafi sought to crush the rebellion in the state he had ruled with an iron hand for 40 years. Indeed as Gadhafi’s tank column neared Benghazi, the Colonel appeared on TV to declare that he would punish the “traitors” and “show no mercy” to them. Just what that would have implied was apparent from the use of tanks and aircraft in the process.
Clearly—as the discussions and the eventual vote in the UN Security Council reveal— there was consensus that something needed to be done to stop Colonel Gadhafi. No one opposed the NFZ, though India and China wanted the situation to be studied a bit more. But with Benghazi already under artillery bombardment, there was need for action, rather than discussion.
The world does have important and legitimate concerns over the action, though it seems strange that they did not figure in the discussions. First, for example, UNSC 1973 has not set any time-frame for the measures that it has mandated; second, we do not have a clear idea of what end state the world community seeks to achieve.
 
Intervention
The NFZ in Iraq did not solve the problem there; indeed, it set the stage for the subsequent war whose consequences we still witness. The attacks on Libyan missile sites and airfields was necessary to create the conditions for a no fly zone, but of what category were the attacks on Libyan tanks on the outskirts of Benghazi? And what are we to make of  Obama’s press conference statement in Santiago, Chile that “It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go”?
We can speculate that the western intervention arose out of its belief that the uprising represented democratic impulses, as in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, and therefore there was a need to support it. But there are some who argue that the rebellion was born out of the  long-standing tribal divisions in the country and that the eventual outcome of the present policy could be the division of the country along those lines.
In the last fifty or so years the world has witnessed many armed interventions. Most have been motivated by national interests and many minus the sanction of the United Nations. In this way, the US intervened in Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq in 2003, India in East Pakistan in 1971 and Maldives in 1988, the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
The list of interventions that did not take place is even more graphic. Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge was allowed to carry on a genocide of the Cambodians and the Vietnamese invasion which overthrew the regime was opposed by China and the western nations. No one intervened in the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, or the systematic killing of Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s.
More recently, people have pointed out that while the UNSC has authorised action in Libya, it remains silent on Bahrain and Yemen, both well-known American allies.

Responsibility
Like it or not, we cannot avoid intervening in the affairs of others. Should the world stand by when rulers decide to punish their own populace, or, as in Rwanda, Cambodia and erstwhile Yugoslavia, wipe out entire groups of people because of their ethnicity or religion?
Obviously we need rules to undertake such ventures. Despite the flaws in UNSC 1973, it is based on international law which  is admittedly imperfect. Even so, countries who are now wailing, that they did not realise what an NFZ would imply are lying.
President Obama’s behaviour has not been particularly courageous on Libya; his travails in Iraq and Afghanistan probably explain this. But he did have a point when he told our Parliament last year that it was “unacceptable to gun down peaceful protestors and incarcerate political prisoners decade after decade” and that national sovereignty could not be used as a shield for this.
In the same speech he had also bluntly pointed out that “in international fora, India has often avoided these issues.” In abstaining on the UN vote on Libya and fudging its stand the way it is doing, New Delhi’s response has, sadly, been par for the course.
Mail Today March 24, 2011